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Tuesday, 16 August 2016

#RPGaDAY2016 - Day 16: Historical person you'd like in your group? What game?

I've been racking my brains trying to think. I think I'm taking it too seriously, because I dismiss people due to language or cultural divides... but then again, if we're looking for someone who would suit our group, then language/culture does matter (though I suppose we could assume a universal translator/babel fish to get round language). And I'd want to pick someone who'd want to play, which (asides Francis Drake's famous game of bowls) isn't something history usually records. Picking someone and saying they want to play, or their culture doesn't affect the way they think (I'm thinking Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, here, whom I'd love to meet but the culture shock either way would likely render that meeting unsatisfying) is cheating to me: you're changing the person. Which makes this difficult.

Geoffrey Chaucer would be interesting to meet: a great storyteller, but also an astronomer might imply the right kind of geekery. His writing shows humour and an interest in character, so maybe something like Pathfinder would suit.

Euripedes, again a storyteller. When I studied Medea, it was under the impression that this was a strongly intersectional feminist play, because it highlighted the terrible way the Greeks treated women and foreigners (the title character being both). Unusually for plays surviving from that era, the female characters in his are nuanced and powerful. They also tend to be aggressive and angry, which leads some to view his feminist creditentials with suspicion (and is part of my point about culture earlier). I think I'd like to play something set in Ancient or Mythological Greece with him, so he could expand my knowledge and correct my misconceptions.

Albert Einstein is not a storyteller, but I can imagine him at a gaming table. I'd love to play with someone that smart - maybe something like Aberrant, where the pseudoscience would hopefuly amuse rather than annoy him. I feel like it should be a lighthearted game.

Bharata Muni is credited as the auther of the Natyashastra. Indian Theatre was one of my modules at uni, where I came away believing the text to be much older than Wikipedia says. The myth I was taught relates to the ages of the world. It's cyclical, you see, each cycle lasting many millenia. The world was in a golden age, when gods and men walked together, but that part of the cycle started to end and fewer and fewer men could interact with the gods. Bharata Muni and his son were the very last, so the gods gave them theatre so they could teach others how to see the divine as the world shifted further from the gods, to help people be ready for when the world shifted back in line. I would love for that mythological version of Bharata Muni to run a game for me, something of his own devising, steeped in the traditions he learnt from the gods.